In January 1995, as the Clintons were licking their wounds from the 1994 congressional elections, a debate emerged at a retreat at Camp David. Should the administration make overtures to working class white southerners who had all but forsaken the Democratic Party? The then-first lady took a less than inclusive approach.

“Screw ‘em,” she told her husband. “You don’t owe them a thing, Bill. They’re doing nothing for you; you don’t have to do anything for them.”

…those who were at the event say the 1995 episode fits into her larger political viewpoint. As Harry Boyte, the director of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Democracy and Citizenship who was at the retreat, told The Huffington Post: “[Hillary Clinton] sees herself as the champion of the oppressed, but there is always a kind of good guy versus bad guy mentality. The comment before that was that ‘the Reagan Democrats are our enemies and they weren’t on our side,’ and she was agreeing with that comment. She said we should write them off: screw them.”

There you have it. Screw them.

Screw those people with values. Screw those hunters. Screw those church-goers. Screw those people whose hypothetical offense I am exploiting for short-term political gain.

It doesn’t matter why they might be frustrated. She doesn’t try to explain it. She writes them off.

That’s just cold.

She’s so full of excrement, this one.

The article continues, explaining that after her comments, Bill Clinton stepped in to explain (I’ve highlighted a few sections for later focus):

I know how you feel. I understand Hillary’s sense of outrage. It makes me mad too. Sure, we lost our base in the South; our boys voted for Gingrich. But let me tell you something. I know these boys. I grew up with them. Hardworking, poor, white boys, who feel left out, feel that our reforms always come at their expense. Think about it, every progressive advance our country has made since the Civil War has been on their backs. They’re the ones asked to pay the price of progress. Now, we are the party of progress, but let me tell you, until we find a way to include these boys in our programs, until we stop making them pay the whole price of liberty for others, we are never going to unite our party, never really going to have change that sticks.

The HuffPo author seems to think that the above “is remarkably similar to what Obama was trying to convey in his now controversial remarks about small town America.”

He’s wrong. I bolded a few sections above which caused me to pause. Bill goes far beyond anything Obama was trying to say.

Bill says that “our reforms” came at “their expense” and amazingly claims that they’ve paid the whole price of liberty for others.

What a paternalistic nincompoop. I’m sure poor Southern white men have suffered the neglect of a corporate-driven system that overlooks them. All poor people have. I’m sure it was painful for many white supremacists in this group to watch women and blacks start working and voting. But to somehow claim that this group paid the whole price of “liberty for others” is stunning. How magnificently twisted of you Mr. Clinton.

Here I am thinking that the liberation of any is the liberation of all, that a society which begins to value the least of us can finally truly value each of us.

Here I am thinking that the “liberty of others” might have been fought for and paid for in blood by those very “others” through marching and lynchings and state-sponsored terrorism, but apparently it was all due to hardworking, poor, white boys.

This sounds similar to Hillary’s “it took a president to get it done” comment which sparked so much ugliness in this campaign back in January. It’s never the oppressed working hard, fighting and dying for their freedom. It’s always somebody else.

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